The present inventions relate to electronic communications systems, and more specifically, to electronic communications systems that aggregate (or collate) data from electronic communications and other electronic resources.
Electronic communications systems transmit electronic messages, such as email, instant messaging, and text messaging, from senders to recipients. Each electronic message may contain information that may be partly or entirely encoded as text data representing characters. The body of an email message may, for example, be encoded as ASCII text data that can be viewed, printed, searched, saved, and/or otherwise manipulated. This data may contain a sequence of characters of special interest to a recipient. For example, a shipper may send an email message to a customer to report a tracking number that identifies a shipment in transit to that customer. The customer may then use that number to obtain information about the shipment by entering the tracking number into a form on the shipping company's website.